CUTS TO COUNCIL SEATS?
Not in Ottawa, MacLeod insists
Ottawans who want a smaller city council won’t get it from the province, despite the “endless” calls they’ve made to Premier Doug Ford, senior cabinet minister Lisa MacLeod said Tuesday.
Ford is recalling the legislature to pass a bill cutting the number of Toronto city councillors from 47 to 25 with an election fewer than two months away.
Monday, a judge struck down a law the legislature passed to do it earlier this summer. The new version, the premier promises, will use the Constitution’s “notwithstanding clause” to make the cut anyway despite Judge Edward Belobaba’s ruling that it violates both candidates’ and voters’ rights to express their views and Torontonians’ rights to be represented effectively.
In an interview on Toronto radio later Monday, Ford volunteered that “I’m getting endless calls from the Ottawa region” to cut the number of city councillors here. Ottawa has 23 councillors in a city with about onethird of Toronto’s population.
“People may be calling. I know, having spoken with the premier’s office last night, that there’s zero intention to reduce the size of city council here,” MacLeod said at city hall, after giving a speech to a business breakfast.
MacLeod’s a veteran Nepean MPP, the Progressive Conservatives’ top minister from Ottawa, and once an aide to Barrhaven Coun. Jan Harder. Her experiences at Ottawa City Hall were formative, she told the board-oftrade people.
She said she’d given the size of Ottawa’s city council no thought. Then she shared her thoughts, which are that there’s no need for a Bill 5, a “Better Local Government Act,” for this city.
“I’ve always looked at Ottawa as very unique in this province, in the fact that we had a large amalgamation 20 years ago, we have very rural ridings, very diverse suburban ridings, and very urban, inner-core ridings that are very different,” she said. “We struggled in the early days, with amalgamation, as a result of the lack of understanding between urban and rural and suburban. So I think we’ve got a good opportunity to support this current size of council.”
Whereas Toronto’s council size is such an emergency the Constitution needs to be put aside so it can be fixed. The notwithstanding clause is Section 33 of the Charter of Rights, which allows the federal or provincial legislatures to pass laws that violate a range of rights the charter otherwise guarantees as long as they explicitly say that that’s what they’re doing.
Ontario has never used that power before but Ford said Monday he’ll use it again if judges strike down laws his government passes.
“No one else is the judge and jury with the people of Ontario, except for the people of Ontario,” Ford said.
Nobody mentioned shrinking city councils during the election campaign just last spring. The closest thing to it was a general promise to run governments more efficiently, which is what every Tory turns to when asked where the mandate came from to do this particular thing. MacLeod did so Tuesday. “The Ford administration campaigned on making government more affordable and more efficient,” she said.
So why does Toronto get a more affordable and efficient government but not Ottawa or Hamilton or Sudbury or Cornwall? There’s no principled answer because this is an explanation jammed on top of the real reason, which is that Toronto city council, where he spent four unsatisfying years, bugs Doug Ford and the premier is the judge and jury with the people of Ontario now.
This is the challenge for a populist government: Populism is whatever “the people” want ... as determined by the leader of the governing party. If you aren’t him, you’re along for the ride. If using the notwithstanding clause becomes routine, it’ll remove just about all the constraints on Ontario’s new government-bywhatever-the-premier-notices.
This might make a lot of people uncomfortable, but the Progressive Conservatives have swung from austerity-ism under Tim Hudak to centre-leftism under Patrick Brown to Dougism in four years. They hated carbon pricing, they made a carbon tax the centrepiece of their election platform, now they loathe carbon taxes with the fire of a million natural-gas flares. They’re flexible folks.
MacLeod wouldn’t add any detail to Ford’s theory of government Tuesday. The government’s facing charter challenges over its suspension of a sex-education curriculum that teaches children the proper words for their private parts and acknowledges that there are same-sex marriages and trans people. Let’s say a court agrees that there are constitutional problems with that move, would MacLeod support using the notwithstanding clause?
“The government made a decision yesterday that we’re going to support the notwithstanding clause for Bill 5. I have nothing more to add on the constitutional issues,” she replied.
What could she say? She doesn’t know what she might have to stand for next. Nobody in the party does. But they do know that whatever it is, they’re going to have to stand for it loud and proud because it’s what the people want.